Text description provided by the architects. Marlet 1 is a new engraving, the last one written over its previous traces. It is a palimpsest that gathers the history of the plot. The plot is located in the central area of Ciutat Vella, the Old Quarter in Barcelona. It is circumscribed by the first walls of the Roman city and the successive realities that are still visible throughout the building.

Axonometric

Marlet 1 is the archaeology that leads from the primitive Roman city to the Jewish Quarter in Barcelona. Next to the city’s Major Synagogue and originally erected as an infirmary to attend the poor and travellers, the building still maintains a 1314 commemorative plate in honour to the rabbi that founded it. On top of it, the medieval city deposits its own traces, up to the level reached by the present building, a restrained and solemn construction from the 19th century.

Marlet 1 is part of the history: it is archaeology, it is preservation, it is the care to preserve and make visible everything that once happened there. But at the same time, it is technology, innovation, sustainability and the freshness that will contain whatever happens tomorrow. It is a proposal to adjust today’s lifestyle to a historical environment built in the past.

Marlet 1 is a multi-family high-end housing project. It is a unique and incomparable case in the city of Barcelona. A renovation project that exhibits the original and categorical condition of the building. While it safeguards its spaciousness, its high and precious woodwork ceilings, its large windows filtering the Mediterranean light, its majestic balconies and its attic terraces to enjoy Barcelona’s mild climate; it also proposes a new dynamic way of inhabiting, where design, technology and refinement coexist with the good things from the old days.